What? Podcast you say? Ohhh…uh well you see, we don’t quite have the funding to go full podcast mode on our site. So that is just something we will have to wait on and maybe look at making it a youtube video podcast or something. We are still thinking about it.

Anywhodal, I wanted to make our first podcast about Nanowrimo, which is short for National Novel writing month. Which is every November where writers pledge to write 50,000 words on a manuscript or just in general. So I guess technically our blogs can count too!

I took part last year and hit my goal of 50,000 words on my very first novel which was then put in a holding pattern as I hem and hawed over it. I have been working on it on and off around the year but now I am going to add 50,000 more words to the story. I have already outlined the next half and have talked Kris into working on it with me. He is reluctantly going to attempt to do some kind of writing.

So, because I have done NaNoWriMo before and won, I was looking around for some print outs to add to my binder of crap I need to do everyday. However, I saw a huge lack of 2017 printable things. So, I offer up to you all my super simple, black and white, no frills no fuss no muss NaNoWriMo printable for 2017 for Free! I hope you can find use for them and that they help you on your own journey too!

Sorry to break our normally scheduled release – Tina and I have been working on the podcast and were trying to get that up this week, but we haven’t been able to get it hammered out. This is my blog week, so I figured I’d write a silly story that made itself in my head while I was walking Izzy for a few miles.
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The boy sifted through the objects in the dumpster with distate. Yech he thought, more biscuits and rawhides. The small child carefully let himself drop silently to the ground. He was told to get food out behind this old warehouse, but it seems it was all for the dogs. Slinking into the narrow shadows cast by the streetlight, he looked about for any other refuse. Spotting a promising looking trash can with a lock, he softly padded his way over.

*SQUEAK*

“Crap!” Tripping over a small pile of squeaky bones he hadn’t noticed, he pulled his emergency axe from his waist pouch and picked up two of the bones. Sprinting back toward the woods, he doused the two toys with the bodyspray, careful not to get any on himself. About halfway to the forest, he tossed one to the side. Then a few meters later, chucked the other in the opposite direction as hard as he could. Sliding into a bush, he lay very still, catching his breath and listening to the alarmed barking.

The two guard dogs were sniffing the pile of toys he’d stepped on a minute earlier, smelling them carefully. The two guards wore handsome uniforms with crisp collars, so he knew they were professionals. The boy made sure not to move, not to make any single sound. He knew society had a special place for him and he couldn’t let himself get caught now. The dogs tracked his scent through the field easily, when they suddenly stopped. Sniffing experimentally, the two split up to search, sniffing in circles and looking questioningly at the sky. The boy heard the howling of sirens in the distance. One of the guards stopped, jumped a few times and started barking at his partner. The other jumped into the air once, ran in a few circles and bolted to the first. Picking up the squeaky bone, the first guard bit down twice and bolted for the other. Just before they colided, the first stopped all of a sudden, squeaked the bone twice more, and sprinted back toward the warehouse complex.

Watching from the shadows, the boy let out a sigh of relief. Dogs are so easy to distract, it made him wonder why his pack was in this predicament in the first place. The sirens came to a stop as several more dogs filed out of a police vehicle marked DPD. They were all armed, armored and very serious. The two guards arrived back to their posts just as the squad car emptied out and the new group stared at the other two expectantly. After a moment of silence, the dog with the toy leapt into the ready position and bit down as fast as he could. The somber group broke out in excitement, each dog barking or chasing his own tail individually, then all chasing after the first to tackle him and wrestle the toy from him.

Feeling it was as good a time as any to slip away, the kid slipped away into the moonless forest.

***

“Oi!”

He awoke to a rough shove and a rougher voice.

“You didn’t bring anything back!?”

Tonight had been his turn to scrounge up dinner, but he’d come home empty handed. It appears he’d fallen asleep waiting for the others to arrive.

“You told me there was food at the storage complex! Well I went there, I climbed inside every trash can and dumpster, crawled under every porch and there was nothing.” The boy crossed his arms. He was hungry too, but there was no helping it tonight.

“You go, sleep on the ground. Blankets are for good boys” Scowling, the grungy man yanked his covers away and wrapped them around himself.

Tears welled in the boys’ eyes, but he didn’t let himself cry. He refused to show weakness to this pack of brutes. He needed protection it’s true, but if he could just find his own pack he wouldn’t have to put up with any of this nonsense.

“Fine!”

Storming off, he angrily took the pack and what clothes he had left and set off. He knew there were few places in the forest to sleep safely, so he opted instead just to try another hand at getting something to eat. Stashing his clothes inside a tree at the edge of the woods, he crept out into a small neighborhood this time. Houses where everyone lived were much more likely to have food thrown out. Rummaging a few cannisters and barrels, he scored a jackpot.

“Carrots!”

They were a little mushy it seems, it’s probably why they were thrown out. Who wanted to chew on mushy carrots when you could chomp into fresh, snappy carrots. Shoving his mouth full, the small child devoured the carrots until he could eat no more. “Ahh,” he sighed happily. He spent a few minutes looking around for a quiet place to rest. Finding a caged trampoline by the edge of the wood, he crawled underneath and used his clothing as a bedspread.

***

“Mom! Can we keep him!”

He opened his eyes and immediately shut them against the bright glare of the sun. Covering his face, he opened his eyes more slowly this time, allowing them to adjust to the light. He was surrounded by what he assumed was the family of the house.

“Patches, you don’t know where he’s been darling. He could have lice!”

“Aww mama, he doesn’t have lice. Look at him! Pleeeeeease. I’ll feed him and walk him everyday and he can sleep with me!”

Things were looking pretty bad, his eyes started darting around looking for an escape. He hadn’t noticed the tall privacy fence around the yard last night in his tired wandering and now there was only one way out. Growling and barking at the other trying to reach out and pet him, the boy bolted for the open gate to the yard and leapt as far as he could. Freedom! He cleared the gate easily and looked to check his pursuers. Ha, they hadn’t even started moving, he was too quick for em.

“Whoa there little fella, nobody’s gonna hurt you. Come here, I got some pizza-flavored pringles for ya? You like those” A man stepped in front of him, setting a small can on the ground.

Warily, the boy eyed the dog catcher’s truck and the y-pole he carried.

“There now, come on over here and we’ll take real good care of you.”

The catcher set the pringles on the ground and backed away. The boy sized up his chances. They were probably faster in the short run than he, they had four legs after all. But he had experience on his side, and could probably lose them in the forest if he made it that far. The boy turned disinterestedly, casually turning his body away and mozying a few steps in the wrong direction. As fast as lightning, he bolted for the can on the ground and used his momentum to roll between the legs of the dog catcher as he turned to get him. Getting to his feet, he made a break for the treeline with the prize. Heart pounding, gasping for air and his mind whirling a mile a minute, the boy pumped his legs as fast as they’d move and barrelled headfirst into the trees.

*Hurk!*

A tightening around his neck choked him fiercely, dragging him back. Wrenching at the rope around his neck, he bit the hands that reached out to him and struggled to free himself.

“Easy does it kiddo, easy does it” The dog catcher eased him back into the grass, the pole securing the boy to the harness around his waist. The terrier spent a minute sniffing the boy and smiled.

“It smells like you’ve been living out in the trees! Don’t you worry, we’re going to take good care of you. We can get you bathed and fed, and maybe find you a nice family. Come on little guy”

The boy pulled as hard as he could against the leash, but it was no use. He’d known it was a risky move and now he’d pay the price. If the price were 3 meals a day, maybe he’d spend a little extra time paying it anyway. The boy was helped inside the back of the truck with the other stray humans while the terrier climbed into the passanger seat.

“Alright Spot, I think we should head on back to the shelter, this one’s gonna need some attention right away.”

“You got it ruffles” replied the Bulldog behind the wheel, who kicked the truck into gear and sped off. The boy watched out the back window as the family of great danes moved their trampoline back into place before they were out of site.

I am now in my 6th week of classes at the University of the People, UoPeople for short. It is a tuition free, online based, accredited university that is open to people around the world. When I say tuition free, I mean, you don’t pay for books, you don’t pay for classes, you only pay for your application and final tests.

“Tina, that’s great and all but I don’t really care…”

Yeah I know and you are so sweet to be so supportive of me in my three sentence intro. I only said something because I am so excited about the application I have already given to some of my current classes.

I am seeking a Business Management degree and in my business class I had to create my own mission, vision, goals, and strategy using the various methods we are being taught. They were to pertain to my own personal life and what I want out of it. Well, see, trouble is, I have never really known what I wanted out of life. I have always held on dearly to the dream of living in Japan, but other than that I never set my mind that I would become something more than just me. Mostly because I don’t tend to think very highly of myself. Now before you get all, “Oh poor Tina” , I have to say that a great deal of who I am today as a person was shaped by my past. Even more of who I am has been shaped over the last few years as I learned to move past that and push on with becoming my own person. So I would say the whole self discovery thing was just, uh, delayed. I talked about my assignments with family members who all without knowing what the others said gave me the same advice.

“Tina, you love Japan and writing. Always have.”

See, writing as a kid was therapeutic for me. It provided a way for me to press my own feelings, goals, hopes, dreams and demons onto someone else. Pretending for a while that it wasn’t me going through it. I wrote everything, love stories, poems, dark and depressing or light and hopeful, I wrote adventure, and I wrote horror. Lots of horror. I don’t really know why writing didn’t pop up to me right away as a possible goal for myself. I guess really because I think of it more of a thing someone does as they work a real job. However, as my mentor and cyborg queen overlord has said over and over again, Writing is hard, and anyone who says differently isn’t a writer. Writing is a real job, with insane hours, a cranky and sometimes rude boss, unrealistic goals and dreams, and a killer time sink if you just quit. So if you dive into it, you gotta be ready to live it. Family and friends don’t support you, or worse do but don’t understand the kind of commitment you need to give to writing and call you selfish, it is gonna happen.

I have been given the most amazing ideas and creativity that can spin up yards of ideas in an instant. My husband is logical, intelligent and always willing to help me out. He is my chosen editor and key reader for my works.

So, if you have never done it before, find out what you want from life. It might surprise you and lead you to joy you didn’t know you had access to.

It’s been a while since I talked about something I liked reading instead of rambling on about writing every week. I figured this week I’d talk about The Ranger’s Apprentice. This is actually a pretty recent series as far as stuff I’ve read goes – I read it a few years ago, but it was just published less than 20 years ago! Okay it’s not that new, but a lot of the books I like to revisit frequently were all written in the 70’s, 80’s and..well the 1800’s. I’m into older stories you could say.

The Ranger’s Apprentice I believe has a target demographic of something like 9-14 year olds, so I actually just read the first book to make sure it was alright for my then 6 year old and whether I could keep it around to read Nik at bedtime. Five or six books into the series and I’m thinkin’ “wow this is pretty good” – as evidenced by the fact that it took me about 3 days to read each book. The writing is surprisingly easy to digest for something written for such a young age; to be fair, when I was 10 I read Animorphs, Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe and Dragonlance. So I guess kids aren’t as bad at reading as all that.

I don’t want to spoil the actual story here, they’re relatively short and easy to pick up, but it’s essentially a coming-of-age tale of a young orphan named Will who got picked up as a …Ranger’s Apprentice. And he’s all like “pfsh no way!” and then later he’s like “This is amazing!” Honestly the main character is relatively likeable, but is by far one of my least favorite characters. I don’t hate the guy, I just like all the others better. Especially Halt, which is the “Ranger” part of the series title. He’s a rough guy who knows how and when to help, and he fills in my need to have a badass dude who can stand up to the evil guys while the smaller good guys are still doing jumping jacks or whatever so they don’t get stomped.

The series romps through a few topics I wasn’t really expecting to see – befriending bullies, beating drug addiction and killing a guy with a longbow arrow through the face, but were written in a way that I’m definitely adding them to the stuff-to-read-Nik list. Check out the first book if you have a few days to read a fun story, I can honestly say my copies are chopped up between physical books and e-books (self-control, what?!) so it’s available in whatever form you need.

Also the wiki says Mr Flanagan originally wrote the story as a way to get his own child into reading – I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I’m 110% down with that.

According to my research, The books have been slated to become a movie and started production in fall of 2016. I have not heard anything new but here is the New York Times article with more information if you want! (Link)

Kris and I have been talking about it and we would like to let you all know that we are planning to start a podcast. We want it to be a more personalized voice to our whatever we end up making our blog post about that week.

Now, so much has happened. We got decent mics so that we would sound less horrible and we both have been doing research into what type of podcasts out there might be similar to ours. We talked about format and how we would upload it. For now we are working on getting an Apple ID, Google Play and others to post the podcast too. For now it might just be via a link in the blog post to our youtube page.

“Tina, what will you guys talk about?”

Psh, what won’t we talk about?!

Politics… I don’t wanna talk politics, because that requires much more research and dedication to time sinking activities that I just frankly don’t want to do.

Other than that, EVERYTHING. Science, parenting, school, writing, crafting, cooking, you freaking name it and we are willing to try it out. I want to do a weekly update about our life then just jump into whatever topic we are doing that week.

“What if I don’t want to listen to your soft, honey smooth voices?”

That’s fine… I guess. We will still be posting a weekly blog, the podcast will just be supplemental to it.

“Will you talk about my (INSERT PRODUCT/PROJECT HERE)?”

Sure, but we are going to be honest. That’s just who we are. I don’t want my name attached to an idea that I don’t support. But you wanna talk about your book. Want us to talk about your podcast? Meh, why not!

Also, for those of you who didn’t know we do have a twitter, @keyboardcouple . Tweet us a tweet. Well, thank you all for listening and I can’t wait for you all to hear from us soon!

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately practicing writing short ideas in a concise format. See, I’ve got about a billion ideas in my head just like everybody else, and I can start them off pretty dang well. We’re talking ideas for days here. But I’ve been tripping up around the 50-60% mark on the whole actually having a plot thing. I’m like oh man this is fantastic my main character is A BOSS! And Tina’s like “but Kris what’s he bossly doing” and I’m like “well look he just set a landslide on fire and threw it at an army” and she’s like “oh yeah. Okay but why did he do that?” So of course because it’s an ARMY hello!? But what’s it doing, why’s my guy caught up in it? PSH! Who cares we need more fire in here! “How does it end?” Uhh well I suppose he just, I don’t know he wins a medal and lives in a castle.

Okay that’s not a real life example but I feel it’s exaggeratory enough to get the point across. I have to combat my lack of forward progress or my actual weak point in writing: Ending. The. Story. These things ramble on forever, like holy cow man put a lid on it already! I get exhausted reading through my own notes a week later. This is a problem of course – if you can’t read your own work, who else is going to put out the effort? So I did what any rational adult in my place would do and I just Googled around for like an hour looking for an easy way out.

Ugh, turns out there’s no easy way out. Well there might be, but the people with those secrets are greedy. All the advice I found regarding “How to end my goddang story” revolved around things like “5 ways to end your story. Number 7 will wig you out!” There’s probably a lot of good info out there, but my attention span is basically a knock knock joke and sometimes it’s easier done than said.

I ended up devising a cool practice to help me out. Yeah you guessed it – I just wrote a bunch of endings. I got a (basically) brand new notebook and a pen, and I wrote a brief concept and wrote a plot and ending immediately. Okay, the first try was ten pages long. That’s why it’s practice! I’ve got another few 8-10 page ideas thrown around in various places – I haven’t actually kept them together, that would be silly. The last few days I’ve actually managed to piece together a few one or two page ideas in an outline-able format. This might seem like a trivial issue to both accomplished- and non-writers, but remember: nobody reads stories for the beginning. I’ve never chatted up a fellow reader like “boy this book sure started out amazing. I’m going to spread the word, but just about the first 50 pages!” No way- they’re doing this for that sweet endorphine rush at the end. You gotta nail that bit.

There are probably quite a few authors and writers hanging out here thinking to themselves “Wow this guy is really dumb. I write 100 pages a day, it’s pretty easy.” I totally agree, kudos to your monstrous efforts on the 100 page thing, that’s really good. Lots of people I talk to personally or threads I read through on writing forums are all about how to move a story forward, or I wrote my character into a corner – how do I get out of this?

Try it out sometime – spitting out 300 pages of book into 5 pages is fast, you can write and re-write 20 times with various changes or whatever you want in any writing style that fits your theme. Mine usually don’t include names – the last one I wrote had a main character named “Kid,” supported by two characters named “bro” and “ninja” and the antagonists were “bastardlord” and “gloriousleader.” Of course they were fleeing from the country of THIS to the country of THAT. The important thing isn’t the details of these (hopefully throwaway) stories, it’s the practice you get in resolving those fine details.

As our youngest started on his journey of education it gave way to thoughts about my own education. I got pregnant my senior year of high school and was pressured into going to an alternative school where kids that couldn’t go to school with others for some reason or another were sent to work at their own pace. I took that as a personal challenge to get my full senior year plus some done before Thanksgiving break. I had the whole rest of the year to myself to think about college.

I did enroll. I attempted to attend a local Christian university that had offered me a scholarship. However I was working two jobs to pay for daycare and had a full course schedule. I overloaded myself and quickly dropped out. I attempted once again to go to a community college with just a few classes. Fearing overload again. However, unresolved medical issues stepped up and forced me away from school again.

I spent the next few years researching and diving into ideas for different ways to go to school but always failing at going any further due to lack of funds.

Cue my 30th birthday, I had been feeling like this one simple thing called a degree was missing from my life. All my goals and dreams hindering on a 4 year commitment to working my ass off. So, now I am working on becoming a better me via Threopy and working closely with my doctors to make myself better each day. That has included enrolling in an undergraduate program for business management. I am working hard and facing my personal struggles head on. I know things will get better and that all things change. Our universe is in a constant state of change so your bad luck one day will pass eventually.
So enjoy the moments in your life that make you smile, chase after the dreams, because you were built for the chase and don’t worry over the mistakes, they fade with time. I love you all!
Tina